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Dr Caelli Jo Brooker is a designer and artist whose work explores visuality, mark-making, materiality, typography and abstraction. Operating between art and design, her broader practice takes an interdisciplinary approach in bridging the analogue and digital spheres, incorporating studio art, traditional and digital print media, typography, design image-making and artists’ books. Her professional background is in commercial design, creative pedagogy and the cultural and creative industries. Having previously worked as an arts administrator, curator and ARI gallery director, she maintains a design and visual arts practice while working as a Lecturer in Visual Communication Design at the University of Newcastle.

Professor Paul Gough RWA is Pro Vice- Chancellor and Vice-President of RMIT University, based in Melbourne, Australia. A painter, broadcaster and writer he has exhibited globally and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. In addition to roles in national and international higher education, his research into the imagery of war and peace has been presented to audiences throughout the world. In addition to an exhibiting record he has published a monograph on Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere, in 2006; A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War in 2010, and Your Loving Friend, the edited correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute, in 2011. Books on the street artist Banksy were published in 2012, and on painters John and Paul Nash in 2014.

Phoebe Hart is an academic and a writer, director and producer of documentaries, factual content and children’s television. In 2009 Phoebe completed her PhD at QUT entitled Orchids: Intersex and Identity in Documentary, which received a Dean’s Commendation, and out of which grew an innovative long form documentary lm for ABC1 entitled Orchids: My Intersex Adventure. The lm premiered at the Brisbane International Film Festival where it was voted the number one lm of the festival by audiences, and went on to win an Australian Teachers of Media Award and an Australian Directors Guild Award, among many others.

John Hughes’ creative practice includes drama, documentary, on-line documentary, video art and gallery installation. His current project is a history of Filmmakers’ Co-operatives in Australia (1966-86). He was Commissioning Editor, Documentary, SBS Independent 1998-2001. Recent works as producer, writer, director: Love & Fury: Judith Wright and ‘Nugget’ Coombs (2013, 28 minutes), Indonesia Calling (2009, 90 minutes,), The Archive Project (2006, 98 minutes,). The Archive Project: Realist Film Unit in Cold War Australia was published in 2013 (Metro). He is currently Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University and Honorary Fellow, School of Film and Television, Faculty VCA&MCM, University of Melbourne.

Composer, sound artist, researcher and director James Hullick was McKenzie Fellow at UoM 2012-14 and is currently undertaking an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship and the Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship for Piano. As director of JOLT Arts (www.joltarts.org) and The Click Clack Project (www. clickclackproject.org), and as an artist showing at Mars Gallery, Hullick is emerging as one of Australia’s leading cutting-edge arts practitioners, thinkers and community arts advocates.

Lisa Young is well known to choral, world and jazz music listeners as a creative vocal stylist and improviser, incorporating Indian and African elements in her work. A longtime student of maestro Guru Kaaraikkudi Mani in Chennai, Lisa specialises in konnakol - South Indian vocal percussion She performs worldwide with vocal group Coco’s Lunch who has recorded 7 CDs of original music receiving 2 ARIA nominations, and also with her jazz quartet, who won the prestigious BELL Award for Best Australian Vocal Album in 2007. Renowned as a passionate and engaging workshop leader, choirs throughout the world perform Young’s works.

Brian Martin is of Bundjalung and Muruwari descent. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) degree at Sydney University. He has been a practising artist for twenty-three years and has exhibited both nationally and internationally specifically in the media of painting and drawing. He completed his PhD by research at Deakin University, which focused on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to “Country”. Brian is currently Professor and Acting Director of the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University where he leads research specifically pertaining Indigenous knowledges, validity and methodological approaches to a research paradigm.

Kate Just holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Sculpture) from Monash University, a Master of Arts from RMIT and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts where she has been a Lecturer in Art since 2005. Just has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across Australia as well as overseas in Auckland, New York and Vienna. Notable recent exhibitions include Just’s solo exhibition Venus Was Her Name at the Kunsthalle in Krems, a survey of Just’s major knitted works entitled Kate Just: The Knitted Work 2004 – 2011 at Ararat Regional Gallery, and her inclusion in the group exhibition Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

Daniel Templeman has recently been awarded a Doctorate in Visual Art from the Queensland College of Art. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has completed major public art commission in locations such as, the Brisbane Magistrates Court, the Queensland–New South Wales border, Melbourne’s CBD, University of Western Sydney, Southbank Educational Precinct, and several works throughout Brisbane’s CBD. Templeman was a recipient of an Australian Post–Graduate Scholarship. Daniel Templeman is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf Gallery, Sydney.

Peter Waller’s installations appear austere, are often dimly lit, and made with pale, cold tones and time-worn materials. The walls are scoured or begrimed. This amounts to a moody kind of formalism, and is the product of long research into ancient Eastern artistic traditions of otherworldliness and open-endedness aimed at achieving wakefulness, and cultivating illuminating doubt. Waller’s art, then, is an ongoing effort to adapt these methods and concerns to the contemporary practice of installation.

Margaret Merrilees has an MA in Creative Writing (University of Adelaide) and a PhD from Flinders University. Her short work has appeared in dotlit, JASAL, Meanjin, Island, Wet Ink, and Griffith Review. Her novel The First Week (Wake eld Press 2013), completed as part of her PhD, won the manuscript award at Adelaide Writers’ Week. It was longlisted for a Dobbie award and shortlisted both for the Barbara Jefferis Award and for a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Fables Queer & Familiar (Wake eld Press 2014), a collection from the online serial Adelaide Days and is also broadcast as a radio serial.

Sally Berridge’s creative research is well- grounded in the life sciences of botany, zoology, physiology and microbiology, as well as physics and analytical chemistry. She spent nearly 20 years as an objective research scientist before gladly stepping towards the dark side (subjectivity) at art school. Later she was able to combine creative writing and her art practice into the form of a practice-led PhD at the University of Canberra. Her disrupted colonial childhood and subsequent multiple migrations (India, England, Kenya, England, Australia) led her to autobiography, and with it, contemplation of the effects of autobiographical work on memory and identity.

Francesca Rendle-Short is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is co-director of the non fictionLab Research Group and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange). An award winning novelist, memoirist and essayist, her Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong received an Examiners’ Commendation for Outstanding Thesis. Her most recent book is the critically acclaimed memoir-cum-novel Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press) shortlisted for the 2012 Colin Roderick Literary Award. In 2013, she was the recipient of the International Non fiction Writer Fellowship to the University of Iowa Non fiction Writing Program, USA.

Over the past thirty years Nick Haywood has become one of the most in demand bassists and educators on the Australian music scene, having performed at major festivals and concerts in Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Europe, China and the USA.

Anthony Lyons is an accomplished Australian composer and musician whose practice is an interdisciplinary one that crosses into video, performance and installation. An active researcher in electronic composition and performance, his work has been featured in festivals and conferences such as the 2013 ICMC International Computer Music Conference - Developments in Electro-acoustics. His compositional work pursues beauty of line, sonority and site-specific context, drawing from both popular and art music traditions. Electronic and sampled elements are a feature and reveal research interests in pulse, palindromic structures, glitch and microsound aesthetics. Anthony’s doctoral studies focused on the compositional process and an examined nexus between technology, extra-musical interaction and structural design. He is a Lecturer in Interactive Composition at the VCA School of Contemporary Music, Faculty of the VCA & MCM at the University of Melbourne.

Moana Nepia is a choreographer, video artist and curator who studied dance at the VCA in Melbourne in the 1980’s, had careers in classical ballet and contemporary dance in New Zealand and Europe, then retrained as a painter at Chelsea and Wimbledon Schools of Art in London. His work has been included in exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the UK, Germany, Canada, the US and Palau. He has published poetry, curated exhibitions on lm, video and photography of Māori dance, contemporary Pacific Island art, is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, and Arts Editor for The Contemporary Pacific.

Ian Burns is an artist and post-doctoral researcher with Griffith University. He completed his Masters at Hunter College, New York City in 2003 and his PhD through Griffith University, Queensland College of Art in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions at numerous venues across Europe, the United States and Australia and his work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the NGV and ACMI in Melbourne, MCA in Sydney, the MMK in Frankfurt and the MAK in Vienna.

Chrisoula Lionis is a researcher and curator based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, Art & Design UNSW. Lionis is the author of Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming, 2015) and has published widely in the eld of visual culture in journals such as Social Text and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Examples of her curatorial work include the annual Palestinian Film Festival in Australia, Cyprus – Pictures of Peacekeeping (2007), and Beyond the Last Sky: Contemporary Palestinian Photography and Video (2012) at the Australian Centre for Photography.

The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in the exhibition and screening of Palestinian art and lm in festivals, galleries and cinemas around the world. Since the mid 1990s this Palestinian work has been marked by a distinct turn toward the employment of humour. This shift signals a radical departure from the aesthetic modes that previously dominated Palestinian art and Film. Only with an understanding of the historical trajectory of Palestinian art and lm and its relationship to critical moments in history can one understand how the failure of the peace process has led to the proliferation of humour in Palestinian cultural output.

This paper will discuss the role of humour in contemporary Palestinian art and lm and the significance of curatorial practice- led research in the development of a PhD thesis in visual culture. More specificallyit will address the specific challenges of conducting research on Palestinian art and lm in an Australian context and the crucial role of curatorial work as a means to establish research networks, access to art and lm and to the cultivation of research outreach through community involvement.

Derek Kreckler was awarded a doctorate (DCA–Creative Arts) from the University of Wollongong in 2012. Since 1977 Derek has been working across performance, video sound and photography, examining the transformation of modes of historical avant-gardism into the present. He has exhibited internationally in China, Korea, USA, and the UK, and extensively throughout Australia. Recent group exhibitions include: Littoral as part of LANDSEASKY at OCAT, Shanghai, 2014; Good Little Soldier (set design and video) Radialsystem V Berlin, 2013; Holey (objects and photographs) The Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2003; The Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia 2004; White Goods ‘On Reason and Emotion’, the 2004 Biennale of Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney.